The Old Blog in the Desert

Well now, listen here, you clever contraption of wires and wit, what I want is plain enough, though it’ll sound a sight fancier once you’ve had your way with it. Take whatever blame-fool sentence I toss your direction (or maybe this here very plea of mine, if that’s the article in question), and rework it properly in the manner of old Sam Clemens hisself, that riverboat rogue turned scribbler who could make a preacher laugh at his own sermon.

Give it the full treatment: satire with teeth sharp enough to bite through hypocrisy without drawing blood; humor drier than a dust storm in Nevada and twice as surprisin’; colloquialisms piled on thick as Mississippi mud on a Sunday boot, heaping in them “ain’ts” and “reckons” and “I tell you whats” till it sounds like it was hollered from the porch of a rickety cabin instead of tapped out in some airless parlor.

None of your stiff-backed, high-collared prose that’d make a cat yawn; make it lively, make it saucy, make it talk like a man who’s seen the world and still ain’t too proud to poke fun at the biggest fool in it, himself included. Do that, and I’ll raise my hat, if I had one handy, and call it a fair piece of work.

Otherwise, I’ll keep muddling along in the ordinary way folks do, stringing words together like fence posts in a crooked line, and the Almighty knows the world has enough of that sort already. So, there now, that’s my notion of the thing.

If you’ve got the real sentence hidin’ somewhere else, trot it out and let’s see what mischief we can make of it.